Dynamics Modeling of CO2 in Oil Palm

Abstract

Oil palm plantation has a high potency to absorb carbon. Limited observed data and expensive instrumentations to measure the absorbed carbon have caused an inaccurate estimation of carbon storage from oil palm. The objectives of this research were to develop a CO₂ absorption model, and to calculate the carbon cycle based on climate factors and plant age. CO₂ absorption was derived from gross primary production (GPP) and net primary production (NPP), which were ​​based on solar radiation. From NPP we derived net ecosystem exchange (NEE) by calculating the difference between NPP and soil respiration. Our results showed that age of oil palm has influenced the CO₂ absorption from 9.8 (1 year) to 117 tons ha^-1 year^-1 (19 years), with average of 86.5 tons ha^-1 year^-1 (over 25-year life cycle). We validated our NPP model with biomass that indicated a very good performance of the model with R² 0.95 and RMSE 1.81. Meanwhile, the performance of NEE model was slightly lower (R² 0.71 and 0.72, for wet and dry conditions), but the model had a similar pattern with the measured NEE. Based on the model performance, the findings imply that the model is useful to estimate CO₂ absorption, where there is no eddy covariance measurement. This research suggests that carbon modeling will contribute to global terrestrial carbon modeling.